Not long after his birth on April 30, 1916, it became clear that Claude Shannon was good with gadgets. As a youth, he fixed radios for nearby stores and converted barbed-wire fences into a telegraph line, through which he communicated with a friend. After graduating from the University of Michigan in 1936, Shannon took a job as a research assistant at MIT, where he turned that talent toward research that would change the course of history. It was at MIT that he worked on a machine called the "differential analyzer" -- then the world's leading computer but by modern standards a clumsy monolith of gears and motors that took a whole week to solve a single equation. There had to be a better way, and Shannon found it.